The best way to find the healthy eating diet that’s best for you is to pay careful attention to what you eat, and how it makes you feel.
It might seem like a time consuming process, but you should write down everything you eat for at least a few days.
Don’t eat differently than you normally do.
If you usually have fast food pizza twice a week for supper, for instance, go ahead and do what you normally do.
Then write it down, as well as how you felt that evening.
After a few days, you should have a log of everything you’ve eaten over the last few days (a week or more is ideal, though) as well as notes about how you felt after eating, and your general sense of wellness.
Did you wake up feeling puffy?
Were you cranky a couple of hours after dinner for no reason, or was your mood fine?
Now, choose a healthy eating diet that interests you.
Whether it’s low-fat, vegetarian, or low-carb doesn’t matter right now.
Just choose the one that appeals the most to you.
If you’re trying to lose weight, obviously choose one designed for weight loss.
But if you’re looking to simply follow a healthy eating plan, then just choose one that seems nutritionally sound to you and that you can follow without feeling deprived and miserable.
Continue to record what you eat and how you feel once you’re following your healthy eating diet.
You might be surprised that the way of eating you thought would be good for you really isn’t.
If you’ve been eating a very unhealthy diet, you can expect to feel a little different on the first few days of any healthy diet.
You might feel a little deprived at first if you allowed yourself lots of indulgences before.
Give it more than a few days so you can really see how you feel eating those kinds of foods.
If you choose a low-fat, high-carbohydrate plan, for instance, and after a week you realize that two hours after every meal you feel sleepy and irritable, it might be time to try a lower-carbohydrate way of eating.
So you can change from a high-carbohydrate healthy eating diet to a lower-carbohydrate plan. Then keep track just as you have been doing and see how you feel on the new plan.
If you choose a healthy eating diet that’s pretty low in carbohydrates and stresses protein and fat and you find that you feel nauseous a lot or just out of sorts, then it’s clear that you don’t want to spend the rest of your life eating that way.
Try a higher-carbohydrate plan and monitor how you feel. You’ll also want to keep track of your weight during this time and see how each different way of eating affects the scales.
By keeping track this way, you can even pinpoint individual foods that might make you feel bad or cause cravings, so you can avoid them in your healthy eating diet.
